Allergies? Watch out for pollen today and Saturday

Fordham University Professor Guy Robinson of the Louis Calder Center in Armonk checks on of the new pollen monitoring devices he helped install on light posts in Manhattan on April 3, 2014. Carucha L. Meuse

According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, allergies (also known as allergic rhinitis) are the sixth leading cause of chronic illness in the U.S., with an annual cost in excess of $18 billion. More than 50 million Americans suffer from allergies each year.(Photo: RobertoDavid, Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Anyone with allergies should be wiping their red, itchy eyes and runny nose. A colder-than-usual spring has kept the standard allergens at bay, but don’t get comfortable — it’s all going to change.

"The next couple of days, it’s supposed to get into the 70s,” according to Accuweather Senior Meteorologist Paul Walker. "That certainly is going to entice things to open up. That will increase the pollen levels.”

Until now, the pollen levels have been unusually low. “What we’re getting now is not normal,” said Guy Robinson, a biologist who directs the pollen-monitoring station at Fordham University’s Louis Calder Center in Armonk.

“Normal” can be quantified. Pollen is measured in grains per cubic meter of air. “Typically anything ‘low’ is between 16 pollen grains per cubic meter,” Robinson explained.

Anything over 90 grains per cubic meter is considered “high.” More than 1,500 is considered “very high.”

“We’re running at, like, two and four,” he said. “Normally by this time we’re running to the hundreds.”

Robinson agreed that warmer weather expected this weekend will launch the allergy season into gear.

“It may get close to 80 degrees,” he said. “That should be enough to trigger this whole thing. It should start in earnest probably today or tomorrow.”

The concern is that all the trees that have usually started flowering by now — “elm and cypress are the ones that come in quite early, typical for March,” Robinson said — will explode with clouds of allergy-inducing pollen previously held back by the unseasonal cold.

“Trees are already out there this time. Some of your flowers have already bloomed by this time and we’re not noticing that yet,” Walker said. “Seems like everything’s going to be coming out close to the same time.”

According to Robinson, that’s true, to a degree. He said there’s a sequence — cypress and elm first, then oak, ash and birch, with grasses and weeds coming by June. That sequence will be followed though it might be “telescoped” this year.

“I wouldn’t say ‘all at once.’ There’s still going to be a predictable sequence of different kinds of flowering trees,” he said, though pollen counts won’t stay in the low range. “We’re probably going to run into high levels.”